A business partner rejects a proposal you thought was a done deal. Two employees refuse to work with one another. A waiter gets angry and yells at a customer.
In all of these situations, emotional intelligence could help you successfully manage your business and achieve desired outcomes. Entrepreneur Paul Bulau discusses the role of emotional intelligence in the business setting and why it’s so important for effective and efficient leadership.
What Is Emotional Intelligence?
Emotional intelligence entails being aware of your emotions, controlling how you express them, perceiving emotions in others, and using that knowledge to successfully manage relationships and behave in an empathetic manner.
“In the business setting, emotional empathy can have many benefits, particularly when it comes to resolving conflicts,” Paul Bulau explains. “Considering others’ emotions can help each side feel heard and understood.”
Self-Management
Business leaders often deal with a lot of stress. They are the plate-spinners of the business world since they’re concerned with everything from cash flow and company goals to vendor relationships, employee management, and customer satisfaction, among other things. Emotional intelligence allows leaders to maintain awareness of their own emotional state and self-regulate.
“Suppose you’re upset about something at work or in your personal life and you take it out on an employee by yelling,” says Paul Bulau.
“Now, that employee is having a bad day, too, which could lead to poor performance and low morale that impact customer interactions. You’ve started a chain reaction that could have been avoided if you’d recognized your emotions, self-regulated, and maintained your composure.”
Steering Outcomes
Perception and empathy are also key components of emotional empathy that are critical to building rapport and effectively managing relationships. You need to know when employees are having a rough day so you can get to the root of the problem, provide appropriate support, and make sure customers aren’t impacted.
Taking time to understand why people are acting in certain ways can help you to solve problems, resolve conflict, and create positive outcomes for everyone involved. Whether you’re dealing with business partners, employees, or customers, emotional intelligence plays a major role in de-escalating and finding positive solutions.
Identifying Emotional Intelligence in Others
As a leader in your business, you may be tasked with hiring or at least participating in the hiring process. Understanding emotional intelligence can help you recognize it in others. According to Paul Bulau, building a functional team requires more than just hiring candidates who have the requisite education and experience.
Soft skills like communication and emotional intelligence contribute to a workplace where employees feel safe and supported. This can help decrease stress, improve decision-making, and increase performance. When leaders possess emotional intelligence and seek employees who are also emotionally intelligent, the result could be a workplace with high morale, motivated employees, and low turnover.
Foster Emotional Intelligence in the Workplace
Emotional intelligence is not necessarily innate, and it can be learned. Whether you want to foster this skill in leadership alone or in all your employees, consider training workshops designed to teach and improve emotional intelligence in fun and interactive ways. It’s an investment that could yield significant gains in the workplace.
About Paul Bulau
Paul Bulau is a culinary entrepreneur, business founder, and company owner/operator known for operational success, collaboration, and team development. For the past 25 years, Paul has served in several management roles with a premier, on-site restaurant company.
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